Andrea Ohl and Julia Green

[00:02] ANDREA OHL: Hi, I'm Andrea ohl I go by Ann. I'm 81 years old. Today's date is February 25, 2023. We're in Alpine, Texas, outside of Alpine, Texas. My interview partner is Julia Green, and she's my daughter.

[00:23] JULIA GREEN: Hi, I'm Julia Green. I'm 53 years old. Today's date is February 25, 2023. We are just south of Alpine, Texas. My interview partner is my mother, Andrea. Oh, hi.

[00:37] ANDREA OHL: Hi.

[00:40] JULIA GREEN: I guess the first thing I want to ask you is about your childhood. Where were you born?

[00:45] ANDREA OHL: I was born in Waterloo, Iowa, in a little hospital. I was the only one of my children. I have seven siblings, and they were all born at home except me. I was born in a hospital because my father was so horrified that my mother had a child, my older sister, because I'm the second one. And so my mother had to basically move next to the hospital when she was due with me. And I was born in the hospital. And it was a terrible experience for my mother. And so none of the others, the following six, were all born at home. And so I was always the kind of the outcast in the family because I wasn't breastfed like all the others. And my mother even told me that she doesn't have any memories of me. But it didn't matter because I had an older sister who mothered me all the time, and then I mothered all my brothers and sisters, and my mother wasn't really an active mother.

[01:48] JULIA GREEN: So Carrie was born, so everybody was born. I didn't know that you were the only one born in the hospital.

[01:54] ANDREA OHL: Yes, I was.

[01:57] JULIA GREEN: But you guys moved around all the time.

[01:59] ANDREA OHL: Yeah.

[02:00] JULIA GREEN: So were the others not born? Why were the others not born in a hospital?

[02:04] ANDREA OHL: Because my mother had such a horrible experience having me in the hospital, because back then, this was in 41. They kept you in your bed for ten days. You weren't allowed, and they came in all the time and pushed on her stomach to get her uterus to retract. And it was painful. And they didn't let her breastfeed. And it was just everything was wrong with it.

[02:31] JULIA GREEN: That sounds horrible. Did she have a midwife or anything when she had home birth?

[02:37] ANDREA OHL: My dad was the midwife. And for the younger one, my dad was great at it. And for the younger ones, I helped. And I was usually with my youngest two sisters and brother. I was the first one to hold them. My dad would catch them, hand them to me. I would clean them up. And then we always, I don't know why, but we always fed them sugar water in a spoon, which was really hard to feed a tiny, tiny baby with a spoon, but you dribble all over.

[03:11] JULIA GREEN: Well, I guess growing up on a farm, it was just, you know, your dad helping your mom give birth was just like the cow.

[03:20] ANDREA OHL: Yeah. Unfortunately, it wasn't much different. And my mother had had pretty easy births for the most part. The last one, which is why there's only eight of us, was hard. And so they said, no more.

[03:36] JULIA GREEN: There's only eight of you?

[03:37] ANDREA OHL: Yeah, they wanted twelve.

[03:40] JULIA GREEN: Wow. When did you leave the farm in Iowa?

[03:45] ANDREA OHL: Well, my father was a very jack of all trades, and his name was actually Jack, but he could do absolutely anything. He could fix any machine on earth. He could build anything. He could do electrical, plumbing. He noticed this was in. We stayed on a farm. My dad was a tenant farmer until we made enough money to buy our own farm. But in the meantime, this was about 1950. The korean war was on. It was a little after 1950, and scrap metal was very valuable because they were needed for the war machine. And so my dad noticed every farmer had a pile of scrap metal, a junk pile of old machines that didn't work anymore. And so he went around to all the farmers and told them that if they paid him $50, he'd haul away all their junk.

[04:51] JULIA GREEN: Is that when he started his junkyard?

[04:53] ANDREA OHL: Yep. So he was a recycler from way back, and so he would go around and not only would he get $50 for hauling their junk away, but then he would sell the junk and get more money. So he would cut it up with a cutting torch. He would cut it up into movable pieces and then haul it in a big flatbed truck to this metal dealer, scrap metal dealer in Waterloo. And the train went through Waterloo, and then it was loaded onto a train and went to, I don't know, iron foundries or manufacturing somewhere. But anyway, so he did that. And there was much more money in that than in farming. And he loved it. And he liked going around and talking to people. And so he did that most and left the farm. And he also did the auto salvage. Then he got into buying old cars and cutting them up or selling parts, and he would sell parts off the cars, cut off all the things that were sellable or take them off, dismantle the car, and then sell the scrap that was left. And so that's what he was doing when I left home, and I left home when I was 16 because it was getting crowded at home. And then I lived with my older sister and finished high school living with my older sister.

[06:28] JULIA GREEN: And then you married dad?

[06:30] ANDREA OHL: Oh, yes. When I was in high school, I met my husband, and he was just a year older than me, and we got married. I was 19 when we got married, and then he was in college, and I actually supported us through ba, ma, and PhD. And then we kind of were allowed. I was kind of allowed. He wasn't really excited about being a father, but I wanted to be a mother because I was so used to raising my little brothers and sisters. And so I kind of got a child for each degree. He got a degree and I got a child, but I still had to work, and it killed me to have to leave them. Although sometimes I did develop a typing service at home.

[07:25] JULIA GREEN: Home.

[07:25] ANDREA OHL: And so I could support us by typing.

[07:29] JULIA GREEN: When did you get into archaeology?

[07:32] ANDREA OHL: Well, my husband was a native american historian. When he finally got his PhD and we moved to. He got his degree at the University of Iowa, his PhD, and we moved down to Texas. We actually moved to Texas between his masters and his PhD just because we needed a breather. And we had another baby. And so we lived outside of Amarillo, Texas, and he taught at what is now West Texas A and M, and he was a history professor. But there was an archaeologist there who was doing a dig, and I was allowed to go on the dig, and I was just the. I was bit by the archaeology bug. And I had been going to school, but just off and on whenever I could when I didn't have a baby or my husband had a job at a university where I could go free. And so I picked up courses here and there, but I hadn't decided on a major. And so after I got the archaeology bug, then, well, we moved again. We moved back to Iowa, but there was an archaeology field school, which I took in the summer. And then I started concentrating my college courses on archaeology and anthropology. And so that was probably, I was about 30. And then my husband got a job at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and I was finishing up my degree. So I finished up my degree, almost finished it up at Dartmouth. I took all my required, and they hired me at Dartmouth to be a field school assistant in archaeology. And I did that for a few years. And then I got. They have a thing called cultural resource management, which is whenever a highway is going to be built or a school or anything like that, power lines, they have to survey it to make sure it's not going to impact any cultural resources. And so I would. So I worked there. We would go out and we hiked all over New Hampshire and Vermont and main surveying areas, like around power lines. Yeah, along highways, around lake. Sometimes once we canoed all around the lake bed because they were fixing the dam and they were going to raise the level of the lake. So we canoed the whole shoreline. It was really interesting. And I hiked all over, and we did a power line from Quebec to Boston. And that was a great hike all across the green in the White Mountains. So I did that for a long time. And I. But winters, we didn't do that much in New Hampshire. And my sister lived down here in Texas, and so I would come down and visit her for a couple of weeks every winter. And I absolutely loved it down here. And, of course, I hated the New Hampshire weather. I mean, even in the summer, it was horrible because then it was nothing but mosquitoes and black flies. And so I just was thrilled with the desert. I'd always liked the desert. And so I came down here, winters, and I finally, in 1991, I decided to buy some land down here for when I retired. And so I bought about 100 acres from my sister. And I thought, well, I'll just camp here and putter around and get ready for retirement. And I started working on a place for my house, and I cleared off some of the land, and I.

[11:46] JULIA GREEN: But this isn't just like normal prairie land. I mean, you're in the mountains and it's.

[11:53] ANDREA OHL: Oh, yeah, nothing.

[11:54] JULIA GREEN: But, I mean, so how did you clear? What did you clear? You had to clear cactus and.

[11:58] ANDREA OHL: Well, actually, I didn't want to clear. I wanted to just put my house down where I could, but I did have to clear the dirt. And unfortunately, I didn't know it at the time, but I built on an archaeological site. I started my house on an archaeological site, which I didn't realize until I started running into hearths. And so because I was excavating to get down to bedrock to put my house on bedrock, because I could see there was a ledge there, a limestone ledge.

[12:28] JULIA GREEN: How are you excavating?

[12:31] ANDREA OHL: Pick and shovel. Mostly shovel. And I would dump the dirt in a wheelbarrow and haul it out to our road, which wasn't very. My sister wasn't living here at the time, but we had a road, and.

[12:41] JULIA GREEN: It needed, it was a little scrappy dirt road.

[12:44] ANDREA OHL: Yeah, two track road. And so I would haul the dirt out to the road, and then I got one and I lived it. I built a little shelter for my car out of rebar, arced rebar and covered it with soto sticks, which are stalks that grow out of a certain succulent down here. Soto and I built a carport out of that. But before that, I put a tent under the carport so I would have some shade. So I lived in a tent under the carport while I worked on my first building, which is the one that I cleared so much I had to clear. I cleared six hearths just to build a twelve by 24 building out of mostly stone. And then I finished it off with adobe, adobe stabilized adobe bricks.

[13:46] JULIA GREEN: Sorry. Don't you have a record of how many buckets of dirt you hauled out of?

[13:51] ANDREA OHL: Oh, I do, but I haven't added it up.

[13:53] JULIA GREEN: Oh, well, do you have a rough idea?

[13:55] ANDREA OHL: No. Thousands. Thousands upon thousands. And I dumped it all in a wheelbarrow. Yeah, dumped it all in a wheelbarrow, hand carry. And then rolled the wheelbarrow out to my little pickup. I had a little Nissan pickup, and then I would haul the dirt, and that was just getting rid of the dirt was. Well. And then after I discovered that I was on an archaeological site, I didn't want to keep destroying archaeological sources, so I decided to build into the hill. So then I had even more to excavate because I had to excavate a whole hillside. And then it was just too much dirt. So I ended up making a raised path that went to along a creek bed where otherwise you couldn't walk. And so that was nice because then I could access more of my land. And anyway. But there's so many things I can't even begin to mention. But while I was doing this, while I was coming down winters, I came down for two winters after I bought my land. And then I just decided I didn't want to go back to New Hampshire. And so I started looking for archaeology jobs down here. And I was lucky enough to get a job. Well, I happened to be at the right place at the right time, and I got a job at the center for Big Bend Studies, doing archaeology, which was absolutely perfect. And I could go into, you know, trying, being a 50 year old woman, trying to get a job in Texas, but I was in the right place at the right time. We'd actually gone out. I kept asking. I kept going into the center for Big Ben studies and asking if they didn't need to hire somebody and tell them that. And I told them, you know, I could do anything in archeology because I'd written reports and done research and hiked and dug and excavated, and I know they looked at me as this old woman and decided that finally the director said that maybe I could drive supplies to the crews that were out in the field. And I said, well, yeah, I'll do that. And he said, well, we're going out in the field this weekend. Why don't you come out and see what it's like to be out in the field? As if I didn't know. And so I went out, and we went, and they were surveying in Big Bend National park and in a very remote place. We started hiking, and I just loved it. And I couldn't believe I was out in the middle of the desert hiking and looking for native american artifacts and a woman on the crew, and it was the only woman they'd ever hired on the crew. And she blew out her knee that day. And in the meantime, I just kept hiking along and finding things. And it started snowing. This was April, and they got a freak blizzard, and everybody ran for the cars and the tents, and I just kept hiking with two people that were willing to hike. And we hiked and hiked until we finally had to quit because we couldn't see the ground anymore because it was covered with snow. And because I did all that, they hired me right then. They asked me when I could start. And then I worked for them for 15 years, hiking all over the country down here, which is beautiful mountains and desert. And I had to just pinch myself to know that I was getting paid for that. And we would go out to places that nobody. That were inaccessible because you couldn't get enough water. And we would hike, backpack out to remote areas, and then they would hire somebody to bring water to us on Burros, and so that we were able to stay out because we couldn't have hauled enough water to stay out there for ten days. And we would stay out for ten days at a time, and Burroughs would bring us water. And so. So I've been to amazingly remote places of the desert and Big Bend National park and Big Bend Ranch State park and most of the ranches around. I've been on most of the ranches, and so it's just been a wonderful experience. And we were always ten days on, four days off. So on the four days off, I would work on my house, which is why it took me 25 years to build my house, because, again, I was excavating into a hillside. And. And then the hardest thing about building a house, the most everything was hauling. It was hauling out the dirt, and then it was finding sand and rocks to build the house, because you have to mix cement with sand, of course, and sand.

[19:04] JULIA GREEN: I mean, you didn't just have a dump truck deliver.

[19:08] ANDREA OHL: I had to find sand and it had to be fine, clean sand and there was plenty of fine, clean sand along Terlingua Creek but it was hard to access Terlingua Creek. There were only a few places you could access it. And I finally found a good place. It took me several years before I found a really good place to get sand and it's still a good place. And then rocks. Rocks were the other problem. And I had a lot of rocks around me and my. In the meantime, my sister had moved down there and her husband was building the road better because we had a mile and a half of road of our private ranch road but it was up and down and up and down. So he started making road cuts through limestone ledges in order to make the road not so steep because it was almost a four wheel drive road before. And so he just was cutting through limestone ledges and I just hauled rock as fast as I could. I was worn out because he was digging it up, dumping it in piles and I would just race to get it before it was covered up with another new pile. And so I hauled rock and I had rock piled all over everywhere. But I wanted an adobe house. I didn't want a rock house. And laying rock is extremely labor intensive and slow because you have to find the right rock.

[20:41] JULIA GREEN: And what did you say the other day about what the right rock is?

[20:44] ANDREA OHL: Well, I learned that the right rock is the rock in your hand because you could just wear yourself out being a perfectionist and trying to find just the right rock for the right space. And the other thing about laying rock is you want gravity to be your friend not your enemy. Gravity is the most important thing in life and especially in building because if we didn't have gravity things wouldn't stay where you put them. But you're constantly fighting gravity trying to hauling rocks getting them up ladders and so it's just a lot of hauling. And so I had to find a lot of rock but like I said. And I also had to find a good source of brick because with all this labor of excavating and hauling rocks and sand I wasn't going to add the labor of making my own bricks. And so I found a place in alpine that made stabilized adobe bricks. And so I bought but I had to haul them in my pickup. I think about three or 4000 bricks and they each weigh 40 pounds of 35 pounds. They're ten by 14 and I had to haul every one of them in my house.

[22:05] JULIA GREEN: 120 miles.

[22:06] ANDREA OHL: Yeah, 120 miles. Because it's. It's well, no, no. 70 miles. It's 70 miles to. From my house to the bricks or to a grocery store. And so I hauled them and then I stacked them, stacked them up in the shape of a building and covered it with corrugated tin. And that was my storeroom while I was building my house. And then as I built my house, I covered it up with a corrugated tin and so I would live in, like I would get 4ft done. My house was my house. My. There's so much to tell. There's. I have one building that's twelve by 24 and then I have another building that is about twelve by 36 and it's divided into a large bathroom and a kitchen and a dining room. And then you go up a stairs and up seven stairs and then there's a twelve by 20 living room and then off of that. And this is because I'm following the hill up and around. And I built into the hill and then around the other side of the hill because there's a beautiful view on the north side of the hill. So I have. So my house wraps around the toe of a hill. So I have a north view and a south view and a west view. And it's great because having a north and a south wall, I have windows that at night in the summer I can open the windows and I get a cool breeze that goes through the whole house. And my bed is under the north window, so I always get a nice breeze over my head. Anyway, I can't remember where I was going with that.

[24:02] JULIA GREEN: I don't remember. But I was wondering how old you were when you started this.

[24:05] ANDREA OHL: I was 51. I was 51 when I bought the land. And then I was 53 when I moved down here. And then I was about 75 when I finished. And I was still doing archeology and I really was still doing archaeology until Covid struck. And then I quit. I cleaned out my office and quit because I didn't. I didn't want. I just basically went to the land and stayed there. And my daughter Julie. You brought me food. Thank you. And I'll kept brought me everything. And then you got Covid. I never got Covid. But you got Covid. And so why don't you talk for a while? Because I'm tired.

[25:04] JULIA GREEN: I don't have anything to say. I got Covid. It was horrible. I had it for a month from October 22 to November 19. Just before thanksgiving, I got. I finally tested negative. And then I've been dealing with long Covid since then.

[25:29] ANDREA OHL: And what. What has long Covid done to you.

[25:33] JULIA GREEN: I don't have my taste and smell. I never got that back. I'm tired a lot. I sleep a lot. I have a lot of brain fog, a lot of mental holes. I often say that my brain is swiss cheese. I've lost words, words that I just. I have no idea what things are called. Some things, other words pop into my mind when I look at something and I decide that I know that's not a pomegranate, but that's the word that comes to me. So from now on, that's a pomegranate.

[26:13] ANDREA OHL: When actually it's a sweet potato.

[26:15] JULIA GREEN: Yeah, I don't know those words. I don't know that word anymore.

[26:19] ANDREA OHL: But I know when you say pomegranate that you mean sweet potato.

[26:22] JULIA GREEN: Yeah. So my family and friends have adapted to my new vocabulary. I was teaching biology, microbiology at our local university, and I retired from that after I had Covid because I couldn't have, I was too tired all the time, and I couldn't. My brain didn't work well enough to be able to deal with my students very well. I had to work very hard and concentrate and focus very, very hard to even teach one class. And it was exhausting. So I couldn't teach anymore. So I retired, which was nice. And throughout this whole time, I'd been managing a bookstore for about 23 years, so I was able to just put the teaching aside and devote full time to the bookstore, which I love. I've worked at the bookstore for 23, 24 years, and it's a second life for me. I love working at the bookstore. So it was kind of, it was bittersweet. Teaching, leaving teaching, but it all worked out.

[27:37] ANDREA OHL: And where did you move here from?

[27:40] JULIA GREEN: I moved here from, I moved here from Denver, Colorado, where I was a medical malpractice insurance underwriter. Oh, what a horrible job. I can't believe I did that for two years. Yeah.

[27:54] ANDREA OHL: Oh, but before that you had.

[27:56] JULIA GREEN: Before that I was a social worker.

[27:57] ANDREA OHL: Oh, and then you went to Las Vegas.

[28:00] JULIA GREEN: I went to nursing school in Las Vegas. At UNLV.

[28:03] ANDREA OHL: Yeah. After you did the social work.

[28:07] JULIA GREEN: Yeah, I was.

[28:08] ANDREA OHL: You came down here.

[28:09] JULIA GREEN: I was a child support worker in Omaha.

[28:12] ANDREA OHL: That's right.

[28:13] JULIA GREEN: For four years. Yeah, I forgot about that, which was great, but unbelievably stressful. And then I started taking. I took over foster care, being a foster care social worker, and that. That was too stressful. And I just couldn't. The anxiety, the stress of dealing with children in foster care, it's a stronger backbone than I have to try and help those kids. That was such a stressful job. So I left that, and I moved to Denver, and I was a medical malpractice insurance underwriter. I can't even. That is such an atypical job for me. I can't even say that with a straight face. I did that for two years, and then I moved down here, and because I kept visiting you down here, and every time I had to go back to Denver, I just kept thinking, ugh, why am I going back to Denver? This is horrible. There's nothing in Denver that I want. So finally, I just. I went back to Denver and quit and moved down here.

[29:15] ANDREA OHL: And then how did you end up in Las Vegas?

[29:20] JULIA GREEN: I was working at the bookstore and decided, because I love to travel, and all I want to do is travel. I decided. And that's when I met Joy, who was a traveling nurse at the time. And I decided that if I went back to school and got my nursing degree, then I could be a traveling nurse and I could travel all over the world and the country. I could, you know, join Peace Corps or doctors without borders and do all of that and travel all over the world. And being a nurse was a great way to do it. And then I went to UNlV, which I loved, but I loved my classes, but I realized that I did not like patients, so I would not make a good, good nurse because I did not.

[30:10] ANDREA OHL: I also don't like blood and guts.

[30:12] JULIA GREEN: Well, no, I don't mind blood and guts. That's fine. I just didn't have the patience to deal with sick people, so. So I came back.

[30:24] ANDREA OHL: But when you were at UNLV, you loved the lab work.

[30:28] JULIA GREEN: I loved the lab work. I loved. I loved microbiology. I loved histology. I loved all of that. Working in the lab and working with tissue samples and doing all of that stuff. So I came back here, and I was going to go to UT medical branch in Galveston. But that's when you had your accident. You were. That's when you were hiking. You were doing that survey on the o two, and you slipped on that rock in the creek bed and tore your Achilles tendon, severed it. Severed it. Yeah, severed your Achilles tendon. And you crawled back, what, 3 miles.

[31:06] ANDREA OHL: In the creek, Ben. No, no, no. Three, four mile.

[31:09] JULIA GREEN: Three fourths of a mile. On your hands and knees?

[31:12] ANDREA OHL: Yeah.

[31:12] JULIA GREEN: Through this creek bed back to your car?

[31:14] ANDREA OHL: No, back to. I was trying to get back to the car, but. But the people I had gone out with when I hurt my ankle, I thought I just hurt my ankle. And we were going out to survey a site, and they said, I said, you guys go on and I'll follow you slowly, or I'll wait for you here. And so they went on, and I realized then what had happened because I couldn't stand up. And my ankle, there was just nothing there. It was just flopping around loose. And so I decided I'd better get back to the vehicle. So I crawled and I took my jeans off and wrapped my knees in them because my knees were starting to bleed. And then finally I just couldn't crawl anymore and I could hear them coming. So I quick put my jeans back on. And then they came and they brought one of the vehicles as close as they could. We were way out in the middle of nowhere. And then the two guys carry me between them back to the vehicle.

[32:20] JULIA GREEN: Yeah. And then, and then I was working at the bookstore, and John and Andy came in and said, your mom had an accident. She's at the hospital. And I just was totally freaked out and had to. And rushed to the quit. Just walked out and said, I'm going to the hospital. And, yeah, that gave me a heart attack, having them come in.

[32:39] ANDREA OHL: Yeah. And so then you decided that you wanted to be a lab tech.

[32:44] JULIA GREEN: Yeah. So that's it. So that's when you severed your Achilles tendon. So I stayed here, decided that I would just do lab work and not go for, because I was going to do, I was going to get an md to do, to be a pathologist. And I decided to stay here and just get my masters in microbiology and be a lab tech. And in the process of that, while I was in graduate school, I started teaching, first teaching lab and then started teaching classes. And so after I graduated with my masters, then I became a part time, part time professor, adjunct professor at the university, and taught lots of different in the biology department, lots of different classes. But microbiology was always what I really loved. And when I went back after I had Covid, when I met back, the last class I taught was medical microbiology, which was microbiology for nursing students, which was nice to have that be my last class because I love that. And so it was fun. And I only had seven students, so I could mentally, I could kind of, I could kind of deal with it. And I still, my students still come into the bookstore.

[34:04] ANDREA OHL: Oh, I didn't know that.

[34:05] JULIA GREEN: Yeah, I still have students come into the bookstore. And the last time I had Covid, this most recent time that I had Covid, when I went to the hospital, one of my old students was the student who admit was administered my COVID test and did everything. And that was. That was cool.

[34:27] ANDREA OHL: Yeah. But your second Covid wasn't that bad.

[34:30] JULIA GREEN: No, no, my second Covid wasn't bad at all.

[34:32] ANDREA OHL: Yeah.

[34:33] JULIA GREEN: I mean, relatively speaking, I had, you know, I had the whole chest congestion and all of that nightmare. And I was. I was only out of work, I think, for about ten days, but then I got over it. I don't think I have any residual symptoms from that. It's hard to tell because I was so heavily entrenched in long Covid when I got Covid the second time. I don't think that any of my residual, any of my symptoms are left over from. I don't think they're from my second Covid. I think they're all left over. So I think my second Covid was pretty, pretty easy, relatively speaking.

[35:15] ANDREA OHL: Good.

[35:16] JULIA GREEN: That's.

[35:17] ANDREA OHL: Yeah.

[35:18] JULIA GREEN: Crazy to think about. Oh, that was nothing.

[35:21] ANDREA OHL: Yeah.

[35:23] JULIA GREEN: And you haven't gotten Covid, which is amazing.

[35:25] ANDREA OHL: I know, because I was with you when you got your first Covid. I was with you for four days. And with you sneezing and coughing and cooking.

[35:37] JULIA GREEN: Cooking, yeah. I made you because that was right after your birthday. So I had made you raspberry lemon scones.

[35:45] ANDREA OHL: That's right.

[35:45] JULIA GREEN: And I couldn't taste them. And that was our first. When I tasted it and I thought, well, this is horrible. This is your birthday and this is horrible. And you kept saying, oh, they're so good. They're so good. And I couldn't taste them at all.

[35:59] ANDREA OHL: Wow.

[36:00] JULIA GREEN: And that was when we started thinking that maybe. Maybe I was really actually sick. And it wasn't allergies because I just finished pet sitting at that allergy house. That always makes me sick.

[36:14] ANDREA OHL: And you always got a test on during COVID You would bring groceries down to me. But then we got brave enough and I would come up and stay the weekend with you and Alpine. And we were working on your apartment. Painting. Painting your apartment. And we just had finished painting your apartment when you got Covid, which was good because it was such a dreary place before, and you picked out such bright colors. And so it was a nice, cheerful place for you to lay in bed for a month.

[36:54] JULIA GREEN: Right. And I had just fenced in my backyard, which was great because then Daisy could just come and go outside.

[37:01] ANDREA OHL: Oh, yeah.

[37:01] JULIA GREEN: And I didn't have to worry about that.

[37:03] ANDREA OHL: And Daisy stuck with you.

[37:05] JULIA GREEN: I know. The one time she was affectionate with me, just lazy. Just when I'm sick only when I'm sick is when she gets all cuddly.

[37:12] ANDREA OHL: But she does. And she just. She'll lay next to you, whereas otherwise she won't sleep with you. But when you're sick, she just knows. And she just sleeps next to you.

[37:22] JULIA GREEN: Yeah. Yeah.

[37:24] ANDREA OHL: That was great. Yeah.

[37:25] JULIA GREEN: I guess that's when I know I'm sick.

[37:27] ANDREA OHL: Yeah.

[37:29] JULIA GREEN: She'll give me the time of day.

[37:30] ANDREA OHL: Yeah, that's right. So now that you're. You're not a traveling nurse, but you still travel.

[37:44] JULIA GREEN: Mm hmm. I travel as much as I can.

[37:46] ANDREA OHL: Yeah. And we. And we take great car trips together.

[37:49] JULIA GREEN: Yeah. Yeah. We take great car trips. Road trips all over.

[37:52] ANDREA OHL: Yeah. And we just got back from Los Angeles.

[37:56] JULIA GREEN: Los Angeles. And Joshua Tree. Joshua Tree. Yeah.

[38:00] ANDREA OHL: Which is an absolutely amazing place.

[38:03] JULIA GREEN: Yeah.

[38:04] ANDREA OHL: It's so beautiful. I never had any idea it was going to be that beautiful. So where's our next trip?

[38:12] JULIA GREEN: Well, I don't know because we're supposed to go to Alaska, but I don't think I can go if we go in June. So we have to find a new time to go to Alaska.

[38:22] ANDREA OHL: Or we also have. I have two sons. Julie has. You have. I have two brothers. I keep forgetting that I'm a. That were. Anyway, so we try to come up with trips that we can all do, but it's hard to get three people together, but.

[38:42] JULIA GREEN: Yeah. Because you just went to Greece with Dan.

[38:44] ANDREA OHL: Yeah.

[38:45] JULIA GREEN: And now I went to Alaska last year for the Iditarod, to volunteer at the Iditarod, which was really cool. And I'd never been to Alaska, and Alaska is the most beautiful place. Oh, my gosh. The mountains are amazing. And so I sent the family home picture after picture after picture. And we all decided that our next big family trip had to be Alaska.

[39:07] ANDREA OHL: Yeah. Which is going to be hard to beat. New Zealand.

[39:11] JULIA GREEN: Yeah. New Zealand was. New Zealand was amazing.

[39:15] ANDREA OHL: That was. Three weeks of camping in New Zealand is just an experience that. Anyway, we just have to keep thinking of trips that we can take altogether.

[39:30] JULIA GREEN: Okay. So now. I guess so. Well, that was awesome, mom.

[39:36] ANDREA OHL: It was hard for me to remember that. I'm supposed to be talking.

[39:41] JULIA GREEN: Yeah.

[39:42] ANDREA OHL: And having a conversation.

[39:44] JULIA GREEN: That's all right.

[39:45] ANDREA OHL: Thanks for doing this with me. I'm so glad you did.

[39:48] JULIA GREEN: Thanks for doing it, mom. I had a fun time. Bye.